As El Bulli Winds Down, Our Writer Scores a Final Meal—And More

This isn’t going to be another one of those “Pilgrimage to El Bulli” stories in the course of which the writer endures the drive over curvy, dramatic cliff-side roads in order to reach the serene bay of Cala Montjoi and then waxes ecstatic about his meal of a lifetime there, the one you can never have.

No, in this one we arrive by helicopter.

We choppered in over the rocky coast (hey, look: normal people eating paella at tacky tourist places down below—adéu!) because El Bulli is famously, impossibly far from everywhere. Little time to waste puttering along car-sick-inducing switchbacks if we’re going to make the 7:30 cocktail kickoff and conclude our feast by sunrise. Also this is just how it’s done if you’re Dom Perignon and you’ve taken over the legendary restaurant for a night and invited some famous friends (Heather Graham, the designer Marc Newson) and a few exceedingly lucky normal folks (a few chefs and writer types) for a 50-something course dinner, prepared by 50 cooks and paired with rare vintages of DP Champagne.

Let me get this part out of the way first: It is as good as they say. Better actually. I’d never been before and I’ll never go again (the restaurant in its present incarnation will shut its doors for good at the end of July; the still-developing plan is to reopen it as a gastronomic think-tank of some sort by 2014). But on the evidence of what I ate on this visit, I need to repeat here what I felt compelled to tell chef Adrià Ferran after dinner, at the end of the long night: I am sorry. I got it wrong. The things you hear about, the stuff I thought I knew going in—the image of Ferran the mad scientist, the Catalan joker and magician, master of technical feats of culinary transmogrification, those loony hot jellies and glossy spheres and flavored air—that’s all here but it’s not what makes the place so exceptional. The cooking of Ferran Adrià lives up to its reputation, except the reputation is sort of all wrong, off-base, missing the point because the point itself is nearly impossible to convey. Everything to do with taste is subjective, but the food of El Bulli is immensely personal, intimate, boring deep into your brain and operating on your emotions in ways you don’t always see coming or fully understand.

What I ate here on this recent Friday night left me, by turns, happy, fascinated, semi-freaked out, occasionally annoyed and, most consistently, deeply and gratefully satisfied. Much of it was just straight up delicious. Some of it was intense, challenging, borderline-over the top in its umami-overload. But all of it was food, real food.

Needless to say, Ferran didn’t need to hear this from me—and probably couldn’t hear a thing anyway above the popping of many magnums of DP Onotheque 1973 as the post-dinner celebration moved into the kitchen. But let me be one of the last to tell you: the man can cook.

OK, now that I’ve accentuated the obvious, let me back up and tell you what happened—and why it might matter to you even if you can’t (sorry) get there in time to try it for yourself.

EARLIER THAT DAY: EL BULLI KITCHEN, 1:15pm.

I have, at home, three copies of A Day at El Bulli. I’m not sure where all those copies of the 600-page book Ferran & Co. published in 2008 came from. But I know I’ve never looked inside any of them. It’s hard to read about a restaurant in the abstract, if I haven’t already eaten there. Partly it’s practical. Like reading a guidebook for a city you’re not planning to visit or studying for a test you don’t need to take. Also, I didn’t want to get in a froth about a place I had no hope of actually getting into. (Two million is the number often quoted for the crowd of supplicants hoping to secure one of the 8,000 or so available seats each season.) So, despite these 1800 pages of photographic evidence filling in my bookshelves, I had no idea what the place actually looks like.

I’m glad I didn’t peek. I arrive expecting something cold—a laboratory, a spaceship with a gift-shop—and am surprised by this warm, familiar, simple-feeling place. The restaurant started life in the 1960s as a café and mini-golf spot for beach-goers who wanted to towel off and have a bite. Naturally things have changed over its long ascent from seaside snackbar to Holy Grail of Michelin three-star seekers. But there’s something reassuringly homey about the white washed walls, the dark wood beams and vine-covered terrace overlooking a curve of empty beach.

I come by the restaurant to have a look around, talk to Ferran a bit, and lurk in the kitchen while the prep for tonight’s meal gets underway. We arrive (this time by car, just as the 50-strong cooking crew breaks from its traditional 1pm meeting and gets down to work.

In a way it looks like a kitchen and in a way it doesn’t. Natural light floods the room. Teams of stagiaires in crisp whites and dark blue aprons huddle over tables, engaged in a state of extreme, precisely coordinated, and practiced effort. Some cut sea cucumber into fine silky filaments; others are peeling petals from a platter of pale yellow roses. There’s a humming quiet to the work, but the room is not uncomfortably silent. If you’d wandered in off the street not knowing what kind of place this was, you’d be forgiven for imagining this to be a team of the world’s best surgeons assembled in triage to save the life of some important yellow flowers. (For a detailed look inside the life of a stagiare, see Lisa Abend’s book The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: A Season at El Bulli.

Oriol Castro is one of a small core of longtime El Bulli veterans. He identifies himself as the head of the creative side of the kitchen. He looks to be about 25 but swears this is his 17th year on the team.

“We close every six months,” he says. “Because the team is new every time; it’s like working at a new restaurant every year.”

I ask if there’s a different feeling now that the end is near.

“The focus is on being as constant the first day as the last day. It is always renew or die with Ferran. I wouldn’t have stayed at El Bulli had it not been a place where things constantly change.”

“I hope you enjoy tonight!” Oriol shouts and dashes off to look over the shoulder of some cooks who are presently reducing a pile of onions to a tiny dice, the texture of fluffy white snow.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen onions cut as finely as these. The trick? The technology at work behind this supposed Mecca of molecular gastronomy? Sharp knives. Many hands, ably trained. Could there be anything more commonplace than chopping onions? But even here there is a rigor at work that impresses.

I walk over to a corner where a team of six are pushing “caviar” (globules of hazelnut and sesame) out of fat syringes, one delicate, shimmery black bead at a time. Wandering away from the main kitchen, I’m stopped dead in my tracks by the smell coming out of a small side room: meat. Not just meat, but a rich, deep, salty animal aroma like airborne gravy that gets up in my nose and stirs my base, growly-carnivorous instinct, and lures me towards its source.

What’s happening here? I ask.

“We’re making concentrated melon juice,” a cook answers, cheerfully. I notice he is sawing apart plastic water bottles filled with some kind of frozen pink juice.

No, the meat, the meat!

“Ah, hare” he says, gesturing over his shoulders at the large shallow pans of fragrant roasted giant-rabbit carcasses. “Big hare.”

The smell, I say, is amazing. “Thank you!” the cook says. His name is Richard and he has traveled from Nepal to put in his time here for a season.

They’re ironing the tablecloths in the dining room. On the white walls: an oversized framed photograph of the Rolling Stones from the Beggars Banquet sessions; a rectangular painting of Ferran’s head floating in the stars that looks like the cover of a ’70s science-fiction paperback; several pictures of bulldogs (“Bulli” being a reference to the original owners’ French bulldogs).

Pamela, a waitress from Mexico City, is folding napkins. “This place,” she says, “is not the same as any other restaurant. The service is different, everything is different. It’s very cool to be part of the last season, the end of El Bulli restaurant.”

A gentle-faced man walks by in a hurry. This is Juli Soler, Ferran’s partner and co-owner. “What do you need exactly?” he asks, smiling apologetically, looking like a nervous new hire, not someone who’s managed the restaurant since 1981. I ask about the general mood now that this phase of the restaurant’s life is drawing to a close. “Very sad,” he says, running a finger down one cheek to wipe away an imaginary tear. “Terrible, si, yes, but we need some time to relax. After that we see…” He is off to take care of the million things that need to be taken care of, while Ferran is outside on the stone terrace philosophizing for the sake of visiting journalists—like me.

If fact, it’s nearly time for my appointed sit-down with Ferran, so I wander back through the kitchen. Along the way I meet pastry chef and head of the kitchen, Mateu Casañas, another young veteran in Adrià’s army. I’ve heard that tonight’s menu will include not just current dishes, but, unusually, favorites from years past. Are these the greatest hits of El Bulli? I ask. “Best of?” an interpreter says. Yes, Mateu says: “It’s a very special night. We’ve chosen the dishes we prefer. We tried to create a menu which is the unsurpassable. The 2002 cocktail, the 2004 air baguette…”

I don’t know (yet) what an air baguette is all about. But I mention to Mateu the enchanting smell of the hare. We know about the technology, but this was an older form of magic…

“Yes, I understand!” Mateu says. “It’s a kitchen. It’s a kitchen. People have an image of this place but what we do here is cook. What we try to do is take the taste of each product to its extreme, to its last consquences.”

To push a taste to its “last consequences”: what a great description of the function and ambition of deconstructive cooking, at once earthbound and outlandishly dreamy.

A VISIT WITH FERRAN. TERRACE OF EL BULLI, 2pm

“One of the great myths as regards El Bulli is the idea we use all this incredible technology,” Ferran Adrià says.

I’m sitting with him and Richard Geoffroy, Dom Perignon’s animated and charming Chef de Cave.

“You can take a look in the kitchen,” Ferran says, arms crossed across his chest, shaking his head vehemently. “Muy, muy normale! The microwave is much more complicated than anything we have in our kitchen! Maybe we didn’t get this idea across properly.”

I mention the popular fascination with his spheres and foams.

“Spherification is very simple,” Ferran says. “Making a croquette is more difficult. No really! Some things are very, whooo, difficult [he shakes his hand like it's hot]. And some things like spherification are [snaps his fingers] very simple. It has this avant garde image but it’s just the idea.”

What he wants to talk about, he says, is not the complexity of the idea, but the importance of the example set by pioneering chefs. “In Spain, tourism is the biggest industry. Gastronomy, cooking is muy importanto to tourism. This means that cooking is an important economic factor. Thanks to El Bulli, all of the American press have been to Spain and have discovered Spain: traditional foods, Spanish products. This is happening with Gastón Acurio in Peru. Alex Atala in Brazil or René Redzepi in Denmark. It’s a revolution. I think we don’t talk enough about the influence of cuisine. An example: Formula One. Nobody drives like Formula One but everybody watches it. Cooking is like this, but we all go into the kitchen.”

We talk a bit about where ideas come from. Richard Geoffroy says he travels and eats not so much for inspiration, but for energy. “I’m drawing energy out of you, Ferran, as we speak!” he says, pointing his hands at the chef’s midsection. “Your ideas are yours but, voila, I want your energy!”

“It’s a very funny thing,” Ferran says. “When you talk too much about creativity, it goes away. Talking isn’t creating. Creativity has to be carried out. For a little part of the year it’s OK to reflect. And this is why I said yes to Harvard.” He plans to spend a couple weeks each year in Cambridge, MA, as a visiting professor, lecturing and musing on the subject of creativity and efficiency. “For ten days a year I’m going to think ‘Who am I? Where am I going?’ But all the rest of the days I’m going to be in the kitchen being creative.”

One thing Ferran wants to stress is the importance of collaboration. “The level is so high today,” he says, “You can be the genius of all geniuses, but if you work alone then on the other side there will be 20 geniuses working as a team.”

AND SO IT BEGINS. EL BULLI, TERRACE. 7:30pm

The crowd on the veranda overlooking the little beach is filing in, milling about, talking happily, snapping pictures of each other. More sorties of helicopters can be heard overhead. (Did I mention we came by helicopter?) Heather Graham is looking radiantly cuddly in a cream silk charmeuse sheath with matching knitted cream wrap. Neither she nor her boyfriend, the very nice filmmaker Jason Silva, had been to the restaurant before and they’re excited. We’d met earlier by the hotel pool where we discussed the health benefits of jamón Ibérico fat. The British designer Ozwald Boateng is here, wearing a lustrous form-fitting chameleon green outfit of his own creation. “Trying to go low-key,” he says. “Had to choose between the velvet tuxedo or the green suit.” The servers are circulating with magnums of ’73 Oenothèque Dom Perignon in the never-leave-you-dry manner of a wedding reception. Adam Platt, the lovably grumpypants restaurant critic for New York Magazine, yells “Don’t do it!” as I hold my glass up for a refill. “I’m at my limit already,” he says. “Gonna start taking my pants off over my head. You’ll have to fish me out like a dead whale. Oh, OK, I’ll have a little more, thank you.”

A man in a baby blue kimono poses to have his picture taken. The first small bites are brought around on silver platters and meshy metal pillows: a freeze dried beet and yogurt meringue that disappeared when you bit down on it; melting leaves of jamón Ibérico wrapped around an “air baguette” that had the crunch and taste but none of the weight of earthly bread. “Everything in the mouth goes down to its essence,” Platt says approvingly.

The lovely British actress Rosamund Pike is talking to Daniel Lalonde, the CEO of Moët et Chandon. There’d been talk all day about Helen Mirren’s arrival, but there has been no Helen Mirren. Simon LeBon is also a late scratch, depriving me of the opportunity to ask the Duran Duran frontman if he was hungry like the lobo.

Conversation turns to Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant which recently unseated El Bulli for top position on a list of the world’s best restaurants. Platt’s been to El Bulli once before, but it was years ago and he can’t remember what he ate. And, anyway, he denies being the type of person to make comparisons. “I haven’t been fucking anywhere,” he says. “I haven’t been to Noma. I’m Mister New York. I’d love to go to all those places.”

We’re joined by Jane Witherspoon, a showbiz presenter for Sky News in London. “My food credentials? I just eat,” she says. “I was out at Heston Blumenthal’s new place the other day. The tipsy pudding was marvelous. I do like the odd glass of Champagne but then I’m from Newcastle and we’re good on alcohol where I’m from.”

Her Facebook posse has “gone crazy,” she says, since she mentioned where she was having dinner. Her update: “Off the yacht, quick massage and then off to El Bulli.” She cackles cruelly. On cue, more Champagne.

Dom Perignon’s Richard Geoffroy wanders up. “Enjoy your ’73, it’s the least we can do,” he says raising a glass. I ask him how his day at El Bulli has been so far. “Whahhh, Ferran is intense!” he says. “Wow. Whawwwoooo—woowwwww! Good guy. Great guy. Today is an encore for himself. Wow, wow, wow.”

Jean Berchon is an aristocratic Frenchman in his 60s with a mischievous smile. He lives in Biarritz now and works for Moët but was born into the Champagne business. “My grandmother was a Chandon,” he says. “Thank you for being here—I thought only a Frenchman would go such a long way to eat and drink.”

Berchon has been to El Bulli twice a season for the last 15 years. “Tonight Ferran is trying to summarize what he has created with some symbolic dishes from the over the past years up to today,” he says. “So we will have the full view of his retirement.”

Someone breaks a glass. The last of the helicopters have landed (still no Helen Mirren). It’s time to move into the dining room.

DINNER BEGINS. 9pm.

We find our tables. I want to report that my expectations are high, soaring, out of control. But the truth is, at this point I am sort of a non-believer. A doubter. It’s not that I doubt it will be good. Exceptional even. But I believe that I’ve eaten enough food cooked by Adrià’s acolytes, imitators, and would-be fellow travelers that I sort of know what’s coming. I am fully expecting to enjoy it. Hell, I’m wearing white pants, have already drunk half my weight by volume in priceless Champagne, and am sitting in view of Heather Graham and Rosamund Pike. It’s not going to be a bad night. However, the start of these Michelin three-star marathons can, if you care about this sort of stuff, be fraught with a lot of pent-up nervous excitement and the fear that the food and experience can’t possibly live up to the reputation and expectation level (and often they don’t). I’m relaxed because I think I know, within reason, what kinds of tricks and techniques we’ll be treated to tonight. I am confident in my presumptions, comforted by the measured lowering of expectations. And I am, we shall soon see, unprepared, unworthy, a moron.

First to the table are a couple rounds of “cocktails.” First, sticks of sugar cane soaked in rum and cachaça—chewable, suckable mojitos and caipirinhas, respectively. Next the server drops what looks like a pale white baguette with a green glistening filling. “Mojito Sandwich,” she says. You bite and the freeze-dried, icy cold thing turns into, yes, a refreshing mojito in your mouth. Around the table, the first giggles of the night. Let me introduce the table: to my right M. Berchon who asks “Do you have any Dom Perignon sandwiches?” Continuing counter clockwise we come to Rafael Anson, esteemed big-shot in the Spanish culinary world, business man, and former adviser to kings and, Berchon announces to the table, a man who has been to El Bulli “over 300 times.” Three hundred times! We, the table, shriek collectively. Anson nods sagely. Every time, he says, is still an adventure. Next to him is Allan Jenkins, editor of the UK’s Observer Food Monthly. Jenkins takes a sip of a hot-cold foamy-sweet “gin fizz” and declares with an awakening sense of wonder: “I think that’s the most extraordinary cocktail I’ve ever had.”

To Jenkins’ right is Enrique Olvera, a chef whose Mexico City restaurant, Pujol, just ranked 49 in the San Pellegrino list of the world’s top 50 spots. Rounding out our team we have Susan Jung, Hong Kong based food and wine editor for the South China Morning Post and former pastry chef and UC Berkley lit major. Jung, who’s been to El Bulli twice before, described her reaction on receiving the email that confirmed her first reservation: “I just jumped up and down, up and down.”

Spherical green “olives” are placed on the table. They’re not olives at all, of course, but a liquid olive essence contained in a taut skin of the deepest oliveness. They’re what olives would taste like if Adrià and not God had been in charge of inventing them. Which is to say they are all about taste. And the taste just keeps on keepin’ on, like a singer holding a note, like a mantra that repeats in your head.

“If that’s not taste-eeeeee, what does taste-eeeeee mean?” Berchon says, and smiles his Cheshire smile, and we are all through the looking glass.

Next we have plates of “mimetic peanuts” and “pistachio ravioli.” The peanuts look like peanuts and contain a creamy peanut center. The pistachio ravioli are crunchy candylike semi-translucent packages that have within them…well at this point I don’t know what exactly I’m dealing with. The taste is familiar but what’s unfamiliar, what’s overwhelming in a way is the depth and delivery of this taste: Each bite is like a wave of everything you’ve ever thought about pistachios; everything there is to think about pistachios. It is early—very early—in the meal and I’m already sort of off the rails, unsure of my footing, but happy—very happy—to be going wherever this trip is headed.

I put my little tape recorder on the table and, in the spirit of the unspooling, disorienting nature of this dinner, I’ll now simply record the names and descriptions of what came before us and our reactions to them.

Me [speaking into my tape recorder]: “I’m already very happy. What was THAT? It’s so…perfect. A peanut explosion, tasty and sweetness and saltiness. The pistachio has an almost oily, salty over-intensity. Insane. Truly, truly insane. Much more flavor than you can imagine in a small package.”

Jenkins: “When I first fell in love with my wife, my hand was shaking. It’s happening to me now, a tingling energy.”

Waiter: “Parmesan Cheese Macaron, in two bites. And then a Parmesan Cheese Crunchy”.

Me [laughing, hanging head in disbelief]: “Beautiful, beautiful. It just shouldn’t work. It should be sugary or watery but it’s neither.”

Waiter: Excuse me, it’s a Flowers Paper you can open like a book…

It is like a book. A book made of pale white cotton candy-felted paper the texture of cat fur. Embedded in the paper are pink, yellow and green flowers. You bite, the paper melts, and the power of the flowers takes over: sour, sweet, and incredible. There is richness, a giant-ness to the taste that is impossible to describe. The final flower going down is a Sichuan button flower that numbs the back of the tongue like a Sichuan peppercorn.

Next, something identified simply as “Golden Eggs”: A kind of oozy yolky center, sheathed in a crackly-chewy wrapper that pops in your mouth and is strangely reminiscent of Kraft Caramels. I’m picking the sweet-salty caramel out of my teeth and notice that Jenkins looks lost in his own particular reverie. I wonder what British brand of childhood caramel he’s mulling over on the other side of the table. Because I have realized what this is. It’s remote-control food. Ferran dispatches these precision-guided morsels from the kitchen. He’s up in our heads and can make us think about whatever he wants us to.

And then a strange thing happens. A Chinese steamer is set on the table. “Gambas, shrimps,” our waiter announces. We listen for mental air-quotes. We search for the ersatz element, the tweak, the trick, the nodding joke. But we see only…shrimp. Barely steamed, head on, salty, delicious shrimp. Another message from Ferran: “Back to earth, people. Remember: “It’s just food.” We eat them in near silence.

Did I mention that there is no silverware? Most things are eaten by hand or served in the spoon they’re meant to be eaten from. Dinner at El Bulli is unmoored from the rhythms of a normal meal. Things come and they pop and fizz or melt and you wait for the next arrival. And there is an awareness always, throughout the many hours we’re at this table together, of being well taken care of. There’s a warmth and easygoing quality to the service even as you are aware that every element of your experience has been supremely choreographed.

Waiter: “Rose Petals with Ham. With Melon Water. Then Ham and Ginger Canape, in two bites.”

Again a small Chinese steamer, its contents familiar and not. Dumplings made not of dough, but of the yellow rose leafs we saw in the kitchen today. Wrapped around an intense warm, rich jellied broth of
Joselito Iberian ham. There is very little that’s been jarring so far in this meal. None of the pointless head-scratchers of so many under-informed over-excited imitators of this style.

Berchon [drinking the melon water which I'd seen Richard from Nepal cutting out of frozen water bottles earlier today] “The nose, the nose, the nose! Melon, melon!”

Here is a man, I must point out, who has eaten here maybe two dozen times. The kind of man who might announce casually, as I heard him do during dinner when the subject of Macau was raised: “The best truffle dinner of my life was in Macau when I asked Ducasse to create a truffle feast around Dom Perignon ’59 for a private dinner…” He is not a wide-eyed amateur. And here he is reduced to gentle repetitive cooing at the table: “He is a genius, a geeee-nius!”

We are taking off again for the stratosphere. A miso ravioli painted with dark soy and topped with tiny cubes of soft tofu. A nori ravioli full of lemon surprises. Two perfectly-cooked white asparagus tips served in crinkly see-through rice paper with a dollop of nutty miso cream and wild flower.

Jenkins: [laughing, just laughing]

Me: “Mr. Anson, after 300 times it still manages to surprise?”

Anson: “Si, si, it’s fantastic.”

Me: “It’s exactly the kind of connection you want to have with food and it so rarely ever happens.”

Jenkins” “It takes you so far in. The flavors are so deep you have to get deep into your emotions, hopes, anxieties. I’ve never had food that felt like this…”

Jung: “You realize we’re still on page one of the menu. There are still two more pages to go!”

Indeed there is. I can’t name each dish—but what to leave out? Like a flustered Oscar’s speechmaker I need to gather my thoughts. I’d like to thank the Japanese Tiramisu for being deeply, darkly moving and I’d like to thank Susan Jung for letting me finish hers, too. I’d like to give special notice for the Bone Marrow and Oyster Tartare for being so bad-ass and self-evidently delicious that I need only show someone a picture of it to shut them up about “molecular gastronomy” (a term Ferran hates): Small pieces of warm oyster and cut up bone marrow, to be scooped up in a thick green oyster leaf. Smoky, briny, sweet, fatty, unctuous, the perfect expression of Adrià’s idea of “mar y montana” (sea and mountains). “A Ferran taco,” Olvera pronounces. On and on and on we go: A frozen plane of Parmesan cheese “air” spiked with freeze dried apple chips; a dry cake of perichiko mushrooms and yogurt that looks like a French apple tart and tastes like the earth. Or something. I don’t know what it tastes like. By this time, the table is losing its collective mind a bit. Jenkins, the only other Bulli virgin at the table, shouts about the perichiko tart “11 out of 10!”.

Berchon: “A fantasy, a folly, a dream.”

I get up, a bathroom break, yes, but more to slow the onslaught of stimulation. Platt greets me at his table, saying they’re loving some things and undecided about others. They’re having a good time at this table. Enjoying the night, maybe not so focused on the food as we are. They didn’t all love the “umami train” of the Japanese Tiramisu, he says. I threaten to punch him in the neck if he says another word against the tiramisu. I am about 20 percent kidding, 20 percent drunk on the ‘96 Dom Perignon they’ve now started pouring with abandon, and 60 percent crazed with newfound respect for this chef and the remarkable deployment of effort, enthusiasm, and intelligence we’ve seen tonight. (Later Platt tells me he wishes he’d been seated with us at the “f—ing food worship table.”)

Even at our table, not everything is a hit. The Carbonara Tagliatelle, the “pasta” made of some kind of jellied consommé, is unpleasantly gummy and added up to little. A “ceviche” of lulo (a kind of seedy orangish fruit) was so bitterly bad we sat like sullen children at the table wondering what we’d done to earn Ferran’s contempt. Jarred, we are immediately back on track and the hits keep coming.

A half-frozen play on gazpacho and the garlicky Spanish soup ajo blanco is a high-wire act. Creamy, oily, icy, wet—it could be, should be, a cold mess. Instead it’s the platonic ideal, the measure by which any soup (cold, hot, whatever) will forever be judged by everyone here. “What???” someone yells. “My God, my God,” Jenkins says, in a dazzled moan. We eat barnacle topped with caviar, the pure essence of the sea, high and low, ephemeral and chewy. Thin filaments of sea cucumber with kalix roe. A nub of lobster with tiny enoki mushrooms on a fat wobbly rich bit of pancetta jelly, a rich reward for staying the course(s).

The Oenothèque ’69 is poured. The server sets a wrapped packet in front of each of us. “This is cardamom, it’s only for the smell,” she says. We pick up the sachet and sniff. Like a fireplace once the fire’s gone out, I suggest. A smoky taste of Laphroaig, Jenkins says.

Berchon: “I wish my wife was as good as that!”

Olvera: “I’ll drink to that! To the ones we love!” We are wistful. We are over-stimulated. We’ve all lost our minds, clearly, and we’re not even close to being done.

It would take me another 5,00 words to tell you everything we ate and drank. But here’s the takeaway: The lesson of Ferran Adrià and the food of El Bulli is that taste is what counts, what matters. If you’re making a salad at home, or a sandwich for lunch, or a dinner to impress guests, or if you’re a chef who’s fascinated by the avant garde and wants to push the envelope: Please remember, it’s about assembling things that taste great, about finding ways to please and delight. With food, there’s no point to the culinary technology or trends if they’re not about identifying and expressing and liberating and highlighting the essential taste, the beauty of things we eat. There’s so much muddy, idiotic, bonkers-for-the-sake-of-nothing show-off food in the world. I’ve sat through many restaurant meals of it and cooked some myself. If that’s what you like to eat or cook, that’s fine, but it has nothing to do with what’s happening at the end of that long drive up to Calla Montjoi.

About a third of the way through dinner I felt an unexpected emotion: sadness. Sadness because I’d never be back to eat more of Adrià’s food. Not (obviously) a feel-sorry-for-me-sadness. Nonetheless, an honest regret that I’d never hear this particular music played again. El Bulli isn’t my favorite restaurant (that would be Michel Bras). And it’s not necessarily the one I admire the most (today that’s Rene Redzepi’s Noma). But in terms of sheer imagination and precision of output and sustained wonder, I have a feeling this will remain the most remarkable series of things I’ll ever eat.